“Is it really that interesting when a 66-year-old woman becomes a grandmother?” That's the question my colleague and friend Robin Abcarian rhetorically posed in her column Friday as she recounted listening, disbelievingly, to someone in the media actually suggest that Hillary Rodham Clinton's impending grandmotherhood might have an effect on her possible presidential campaign. (The offending media person was New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin. His fellow panelists on MSNBC's “Morning Joe” were as aghast as Abcarian.)

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- A rivalry forgotten, Bill Clinton enthusiastically and extensively made the case for reelecting his Democratic successor, declaring that President Obama “can build a new American Dream economy.” Clinton's speech, all 49 minutes of it, served to officially nominate Obama, whom the former president called “a man who's cool on the outside but who burns for America on the inside.” And it ended with the two men locking arms...

In the circus of speculation that surrounds Hillary Rodham Clinton and her presidential prospects, Chelsea Clinton dropped a bombshell Thursday with her announcement that she and husband Marc Mezvinsky are expecting a child. The former secretary of State has made no secret of her desire to be a grandmother, and sources close to her have said she would have serious reservations about diving into the grueling schedule of a presidential campaign if those demands coincide with her daughter's pregnancy.

President Theodore Roosevelt campaigned as a trust-busting reformer, but was embarrassed by revelations that his 1904 campaign had received secret contributions from New York insurance companies. At his urging, Congress passed a law to keep corporate money out of political races. Now, that century-old ban stands in danger of being overturned by the Supreme Court's conservative majority, on the basis of an equally venerable principle: free speech in politics. The justices signaled the prospect of a profound shift in election law by scheduling an unusual special argument for Sept.

Thanks for the fine Hillary column ("Woman's Place in the House Is Free for All," Jan. 26 Dianne Klein column). This gifted, concerned and responsible woman has been kicked around for over a year now, primarily by a band of political bozos who skinned their knuckles on her husband without success and turned to an easier mark. In my earlier years, they were considered bullies, and their unprincipled and unwarranted assaults on a woman of distinction evoked public outrage. Eleanor Roosevelt suffered through many a year of conscienceless abuse by her husband's political enemies and emerged as the outstanding American woman of the 20th Century.

LAS VEGAS - With a flash of comedic timing, Hillary Clinton dodged the first controversy of her not-yet-declared 2016 presidential run after a heckler threw a shoe and a nearly half-century-old political document at the former first lady and secretary of State during a speech here. Shortly after Clinton began a keynote speech Thursday night at an Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries convention, a woman walked down the aisle and threw the items. She then turned around, put her hands in the air and walked away as security officers took her into custody.

One of the organizations founded to prod Hillary Rodham Clinton to seek the White House in 2016 announced Thursday that it had raised more than $1.7 million in the first quarter of this year. All told, the Ready for Hillary "super PAC," one of several groups that are laying the groundwork for a potential Clinton campaign, has raised $5.8 million from more than 55,000 donors, nearly all of whom contributed $100 or less. While other pro-Clinton efforts are focused on deep-pocketed donors and building a rapid-response operation to counter Republican attacks on Clinton, Ready for Hillary is using the money to build a national voter data file, recruit volunteers and organize in early electoral states such as Iowa, where Clinton's loss in 2008 dealt a body blow to her first presidential bid. The group has limited donations to $25,000 and is collecting funds in a multitude of ways, including a gay and lesbian fundraiser Monday in West Hollywood that had the symbolic ticket cost of $20.16, a pricier lobbyist-hosted fundraiser in Washington this month and a direct-mail campaign.

It has been 22 years since a Clinton faced off against a Bush. Will it happen again in 2016? In the parlance of “Game of Thrones,” will House Clinton and House Bush vie for a return to power? There have been only six years since 1989 -- the Obama years -- when the American president's last name was not Clinton or Bush. And, during four of those six years, Hillary Rodham Clinton was prominent in the headlines as secretary of State. Bushes and Clintons have been permanent fixtures in the political landscape.

For decades, questions posed to Hillary Rodham Clinton have turned on the subject of hair. But for all the eyerolls, that famous coif - in all its scrunchie-to-bob iterations - has turned out to be a very helpful talking point. The occasion Thursday night was Tina Brown's “Women In the World” conference in New York, and it was New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman - introduced by Brown as a “sensitive man” - who asked the former secretary of State and her co-panelist, International Monetary Fund Chief Christine Lagarde, to reflect on whether there was “still a double standard in the media about how we talk about women in public life.” To laughter, Friedman recalled a news clip in which Clinton had said she'd flown all night to meet with a foreign leader and had tied her hair back - “and you said when you came into the room, he was really frightened,” Friedman said, “because he had heard that when your hair was back, you were going to deliver unpleasant news.” “Really, Tom?

Michelle Obama, who has been an effective if tamped-down first lady, took her daughters and mother to China this week. The seven-day trip, which ends Wednesday, is not much different from other most traditional first lady trips, where highly choreographed appearances and interactions centering on the importance of education unfurl predictably. Obama's conversations and statements are friendly, inspirational and anodyne. The Obamas have also taken in the sights, and if you'd like to see what they have seen, you can read her official blog . Their itinerary includes the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Great Wall and the Chengu Panda Base, home to dozens of the magical creatures.

Two potential 2016 presidential rivals, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, did not quite share the stage at an education conference in Texas on Monday. But they both spoke about a common goal: expanding the accessibility and affordability of higher education at home and throughout the world. The former Florida governor, who organized the Dallas conference on the globalization of higher education with former North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, spoke only briefly Monday morning - serving in more of an emcee role introducing guests.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that the U.S. must do more to encourage energy independence in Europe to guard against further aggression by Russian President Vladimir Putin. "What Putin did is illegal; it is against international law,” Clinton said during a speech in Montreal a short time after Putin signed treaties with Crimea's Moscow-backed leaders appropriating the region, including its naval port of Sevastopol, after a weekend referendum.

In one of the thousands of Clinton administration papers released Friday came a hint of what is to come if Hillary Rodham Clinton decides to run for president in 2016. In a January 1996 memo to White House communications director and speechwriter Don Baer, President Clinton's political advisor Paul Begala wrote that in the upcoming State of the Union address “it's imperative that the president defend the honor of the first lady tonight, with the whole country watching.” “The Republicans are attacking her without compunction, in part because they know the Democrats are too ... to retaliate,” Begala wrote, including a term -- omitted here -- rooted in his Texas upbringing.